🎵 Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars... 🎵
My father has recalled to me how, just shy of five years old, he watched the first Moon landing on television. He was stunned at how he could be seeing such a momentous event live, and he would dart back and forth between the television and his window, where he could see the Moon in all its austere glory in the skies above Lawrence, Kansas. I have watched space launches on my smartphone, but I can’t imagine that even begins to approximate the feeling of seeing a Moon landing broadcast live. It is so spectacular, so literally out of this world, that a certain sort of contrarian would inevitably want to say that such a landing never happened, that the American government faked it for propaganda (in a sense, it was propaganda, as Richard Nixon wanted something to distract the world from the quasi-genocidal quagmire in Vietnam, but those astronauts landed there all the same). Those involved in such a momentous achievement understandably do not take kindly to such denials, such as when Neil Armstrong punched a denialist on camera. But that, of course, has not stopped the fiction about such possibilities, as they let us vent our anxieties about our distrust of governments and other such things. Today, we shall be discussing an odder example of such fiction: a romantic comedy about faking the Moon landing. That, ladies and gentlemen, is 2024’s Fly Me to the Moon, directed by Greg Berlanti, from a script by Rose Gilroy, from a story by Bill Kirstein and Keenan Flynn, produced by Apple Studios and These Pictures.
This film is powered by its two leads: Cole Davis, the fictional director of the expedition to the Moon, played by Channing Tatum; and Kelly Jones, the savvy marketer hired by NASA to spice up its image in the face of the volatile political issues of the 1960s, played by Scarlett Johansson. The film's promotion is clearly banking on its stars’ presence nearly as much as by its gonzo presence, and it is the characters that make the film as enjoyable as it is. Of the two, I think Johansson has the more compelling role, being given more to do. Tatum’s Davis is drawn well, realized well, but ultimately is a fairly simple character: a driven professional who wants to complete a massive project with integrity, fairness, and honesty.
It is Johansson’s Jones where the writing of the film really shines. She is assigned by NASA, under pressure from the Nixon administration, to create a fake Moon landing to be broadcast on television just to make sure everything goes smoothly. Before that, we see her in her New York office spinning up falsehoods in the name of Mammon. At the beginning, she is a person utterly without any centering morals, who makes her way through the world by telling people exactly what they want to hear. She is the sort of person who would, in today’s world, be a LinkedIn influencer, someone who bloviates on and on about leadership and mindset to the detriment of anything of substance, let alone systemic issues with the economy. It is a triumph of the writing of this film that she becomes more than odious, and indeed quite compelling. This is a character who, by all rights, I should hate with the scalding fury of a rocket engine, but I found myself completely charmed.
There is a dichotomy that powers this film, like two poles in a dynamo: the fight between truth and lies. Davis is a man committed to truth in the proudest traditions of Western science at its best. He wants to explore, discover, and wow the world fairly. On the other hand, Jones makes a living by lying, and she is as cunning and as vicious as Edward Bernays (the man who made women smokers by branding cigarettes as ‘torches of freedom’—but who refused to work for Nixon!). The entire movie is driven by the conflict between the two. The conventional romantic comedy plot is given depth by having the third-act falling out be sparked not by a trite misunderstanding or coincidence, but rather a real clash between values as the whole falsehood threatens to collapse in on itself. It is clever plotting, too, balancing genre with theme, putting the romantic comedy plot in an environment where it makes logical sense.
There’s another character, Lance Vespertine, played by Jim Rash, who I’m conflicted about. The man reminds me of Roger De Bris, the flamboyantly gay theater director played by Christopher Hewitt in Mel Brooks’s 1967 film The Producers. Vespertine is, likewise, something of a diva, a director who has hit the job of a lifetime, even if he’ll be killed if he reveals it to anyone; and is stated in the film to be gay. Rash, his actor, is gay in real life, which adds some verisimilitude, but he is reminiscent of many stereotypes of gay men in the performing arts, with his diva-like personality and his flamboyant outfits (which I must admit are quite the works of art in their own right). Rash, so far as I can tell, enjoyed playing the character, and to his credit, and the writer’s, he gets some of the best lines in the film. I am straight and so am not the most qualified to judge, but it stood out to me, especially given how little has seemed to change from a film literally from 1967 (two years earlier than the film is set!).
You also get a minor but entertaining performance from Woody Harrelson, who plays the G-man, usually dressed as a literal man in black, who is keeping tabs on the whole charade. This is a static character, only fair for someone who is clearly in a supporting role, but he is hammed up in the most delicious way possible. He adds to the film, and he also gets great lines.
The soundtrack is great, a lot of it period music. There are two different versions of Fly Me to the Moon, the tune penned by Bart Howard and made famous by Frank Sinatra (of course, Sinatra’s version is used prominently). There is also a truly inspired usage of Sam & Dave’s Hold On, I’m Coming during a climactic scene in the third act. The music immerses you in this particular time and place, just as the fashion does, and the unpleasantly but accurately portrayed social mores, none of them exploitative but all of them clear.
Fly Me to the Moon is a very strange beast, a romantic comedy that is also something of an alternate history and a film about fictional characters themselves fictionalizing a real historical event. There are layers here, especially when you realize there was never a real Cole Davis or Kitty Jones (Jones is easier to explain as an absence from the history books, but Davis would be prominent just behind the astronauts themselves). But, like the Apollo program itself, a mad dare that cobbled together a wide variety of disparate elements ended up creating something worthwhile with its own profundities. It won’t be as profound a watch as a live Moon landing, but it would be an entertaining watch in its own right.
Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
